A screenshot or screen capture is an image taken by the computing system to record the visible image of the item(s) displayed on the computing system. Screen captures of an image displayed on a computing system are a convenient way for a user to quickly share information with other users. For example, it may be more convenient for a user to capture an image of a product being sold on a store's online marketplace and send it to the user's friend to get an opinion or feedback regarding the product, such as via multimedia messaging service (MMS), rather than sending a link to the web page of the product. Upon receipt, the user's friend will be able to view an image of the user's screen containing the product being sold on the online marketplace. The user's friend can then share his/her thoughts about the product with the user.
However, the user only receives an image of the product which does not contain any information about the product. If the user's friend wants more information about the product to provide a better opinion or feedback regarding the product, the user would have to manually enter the store's online marketplace's website and search for the product on the store's online marketplace's website. Such a process is tedious and cumbersome. Furthermore, such a process may be more complicated if there are multiple versions of the product thereby making it more difficult for the user's friend to locate the appropriate record on the website.
Alternatively, the user's friend may ask the user for a link to the web page of the product. However, with the advent of asynchronous operations on websites, the link (uniform resource locator (URL)) may not match the actual content on the web page represented by the screenshot.
Hence, there is not currently a means for the user receiving a screen capture image to open the resource represented in the image at a later time. That is, there is not currently a means for the user receiving the screen capture image to reproduce the state of the source environment when the image was captured.